One of my clients, Rocketboom will be auctioning off ad time of their show on eBay next week. The winning bidder will allow Rocketboom to create the advertisement, subject to their review.

Rocketboom receives over 130,000 views per episode. Over a few days, many posts receive over 200,000 views.

With time and place shifting, the media landscape is changing. Portability of the brand message will be critical in this new era of Media stepped in social networks and this push toward edge competencies outside of the enterprise.

Just before MacWorld started in San Francisco, Ipswitch invited a few Vloggers to sit down and have some fun. This video turned into the Eric Rice show, with key moments being Schlomo Audioblogging on his mobile, Eric reviewing the Tiger Electronics VCAMNOW, and the Node101stickering of his infamous truck.

Time and place shifted entertainment has arrived in 2006. This is the beginning of the end of the traditional 30 second spot, and advertisers will need to educate or entertain.

Advertisers’ response to time-shifting has been product placement and integration, something we’ve seen more and more of with the introduction of Tivo, iPod, and other devices that have enabled us to move our entertainment to anywhere, anytime and in any format or form factor.

Now, according to the New York Times, even product placement and product integration are coming under fire from none other than the Writers Guild of America West, which has demanded a code of conduct for producers that requires the disclosure of advertising deals through clear disclaimers at the start of programs. Failing that, they will seek increased federal regulation to prevent what they call subliminal, stealth ads.

The writer’s Guild launched a site in November to track what they are calling Product Invasion.

With pressure from technology on one side, and vocal writers on the other, where will advertisers go?

Perhaps they will actually find ways to offer something of value to viewers, whether it is educational or entertaining. Media over IP will be a very fascinating space to watch develop this year.

Michael Verdi, Ryanne Hodson, Joshua Kinberg, Dave Toole, JD Lasica, and more! Paul Carnine of Vara Software and Peter McClard from Gluon both have cool tools that we may be seeing at Vloggercon this year. Josh let’s us know we are about to get directories with FireAnt, and what appears to be Vlogmap integration!

AOL has acquired the video search service Truveo, The Wall Street Journal reports today. Truveo released out of beta in September of last year after two years in development. Truveo technology uses a “visual crawler” to aggregate metadata about video content, whether it is RSS enabled or not.

News Corp announced yesterday that their new acquisition, MySpace, will be adding free video downloads, a new messaging program and soon internet calling.It looks like News Corp, MS, Yahoo, AOL, and Google are are morphing into the same thing.

Last week, Google announced their agreement to allow users to download CBS shows, Getty Film Archives, Sony BMG and NBA games among others. Neat on the IPTV front, but what is more interesting to me is the underlying commerce architecture. Google’s Terms of Service includes Rights Holders that upload their video onto the service a 70% revenue with 30% to Google. Pay Per View is an option that may open up very soon for Independents.

These announcements bode well for the Videobloggers out there. Independent media should be easier to create, discover and share.

The way I work with people is changing. It might just be that my age and experience is changing the way I view my work. This could be a part of it, but somehow I think it is something much deeper than that.

For you see, I’ve started to bump into what I can only describe as the edges of a collective consciousness, and I think it is happening in many other places, in many other disciplines.

In the Hacker space, take the example of BarCamps which thrust into life last year as FooCamp outgrew itself. Or perhaps Super Happy Dev House. These self-organizing groups come together with no specific objective outside of socializing technology and sharing challenging problems to solve, or proposed solutions to existing problems.

This is happening more often as the information technology space heats up into a strong simmer. Micro camps like Mash Pit are popping up now, as are different ways of thinking about work space like Co-working.

It appears this type of collaborative work does have a precedent: Charettes.

While the architectual students of the cole des Beaux Arts in France worked through their design problems within an allotted time rushing their drawings from the studio to the Ecole in a cart called a charrette, a quartet of painters (Renoir, Monet, Sisley and Bazille) were shaping what was to become the Impressionist era.

Is this happening in your field of study as well? Is this all just history repeating?

Later this year, in the early summer of New York, 100′s of Video Bloggers will converge in an unprecedented “un-conference”. Sharing ideas in both a centralized and distributed fashion with live video streams heading in and out of the metropolis to all points on the planet that can connect and have an interest in the new changes in personal media and expression. Keep an eye out here for more details as we get closer to it.

There is a ton of noise that will be coming out of Las Vegas with the Consumer Electronics Show for the next few days. I hope to weed through all of that noise and find the signal(s) that I am looking for: namely media infrastructure and mobility announcements. Here then is what I have been able to glean from day 1:

Also announced today was the Sanyo VPC-HD1, a High Definition SD recording camera. Coming as early as March, this 8.3 oz, $800 camera, boosts 5.1 megapixels and a 10x optical zoom. Wow.

Mobile Video: Thomson’s LYRA X3000 PMP has a 3.6 inch 320×240 screen and 20GB HD, and is 3/4 of an inch thick. Not sure how well it does digital, but it is ready for DirecTV 2 Go’s analog signal. Nice that DirecTV is experimenting with adding Vloggers to their service already.
There has been talk of Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld format coming into the US for over a year, and it looks like 2006 may be the year for it. Crown Castle has enlisted Samsung and LG to roll out product even though no carriers have yet been confirmed.

Distribution: at&t (new lower-case branding) introduced its version of IPTV to a few hundred house holds in San Antonio Thursday according to the Wall Street Journal. Only 200 channels and no HD yet, at&t promises to expand to 1000 channels and enable subscribers to program their DVRs via their mobile as well as choose camera angles for sporting events. It is running on the MS operating system.

Intel (also freshly rebranded in the new year) is revving up it’s dual core processor video solution they have named Viiv (which I assume is a spin on 6 4) with a announcement at CES that includes on-demand news and sports, advertising and entertainment, as well as our favorite Vloggers. Morgan Freeman will be there promoting ClickStar, his company that is planning to shorten the window on movie distribution from theater to IP. This sounds alot like what Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures is scheduled to do with Soderbergh’s new movie Bubble. Bubble is scheduled to release simultaneously in theaters, on cable and DVD this January 27th.

Finally, Creative opened the doors on a riff of iTunes to support their new Zen player. Check out zencast.com

With the heavy rains of winter, I lost a dear old friend today. Onyx. He had just turned 14 years old a few weeks ago. He was in great spirits on New Year’s Eve and fell ill yesterday. It seemed sudden, and then he suddenly felt real old.

I first saw him as a puppy just a few hours old after returning from the grocery store and finding him, his brother and sisters, and his mom on what was their new den, my couch. We grew up together and had many adventures.

I remember him as a pup, perhaps 7 or 8 weeks old running through the hills of El Sobrante with his pack, the grass so tall you could not see him until he would bounce again, his big black ears flapping in the breeze.

At one point, many years ago, we broke off from “the pack” and adventured many places together. Whether it was mountains or ocean, he always carried his own backpack and supplies.

Hiroko met him for the first time on Valley street, when he stuck his head through the kitchen garden window, and barked. That was the only time he ever did bark at her. After Hiroko and I moved to Albany and got married, Onyx watched our two boys grow up, and was always ready to play in a heartbeat. He had a tail that would never stop waggin’.

I miss you dearly old boy, but I know you now are bouncing through the grass with the sun on your face.